Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
In the winter of 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft - already famous for her radical writings on women's rights - embarked on a journey through Scandinavia. She was chasing something: her lover Gilbert Imlay, who had abandoned her and their infant daughter. The letters she wrote home became something neither travelogue nor love letter, but something more extraordinary: a meditation on grief, nature, and the possibility of finding oneself in strange landscapes. Wollstonecraft traverses Norway's stark fjords, Denmark's commercial streets, and Sweden's frozen shores with a philosopher's eye and a wounded heart. She observes the poverty of peasants and the greed of merchants, the brutal beauty of northern nature and the strange customs of remote villages. Yet always beneath the political commentary pulses her private anguish - these letters are love letters to a man who refuses to answer, desperate dispatches from a woman trying to outrun her own despair. The book that emerged would captivate William Godwin, who read it and fell in love with its author. Within years, Wollstonecraft would be his wife and the mother of Mary Shelley, who would write Frankenstein. This is where it all begins: the heartbreak that led to the marriage that produced the author of the most famous novel in English. A work of startling emotional honesty and sharp political insight, these letters remain a portrait of a brilliant woman refusing to be destroyed by the very thing that threatened to undo her.
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“England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“A little patience, and all will be over.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“I then supped with my companions, with whom I was soon after to part for ever - always a most melancholly, death-like idea - a sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Still the men stand up for the dignity of man, by oppressing the women.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Nothing, in fact, can equal the beauty of the northern summer’s evening and night, if night it may be called that only wants the glare of day, the full light which frequently seems so impertinent, for I could write at midnight very well without a candle. I contemplated all Nature at rest; the rocks, even grown darker in their appearance, looked as if they partook of the general repose, and reclined more heavily on their foundation. “What,” I exclaimed, “is this active principle which keeps me still awake? Why fly my thoughts abroad, when everything around me appears at home?” My child was sleeping with equal calmness”
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Thus do we wish as we float down the stream of life, whilst chance does m””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Whatever excites emotion has charms for me””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature. But such is the temperature of my soul. It is not the vivacity of youth, the heyday of existence. For years have I endeavoured to calm an impetuous tide, labouring to make my feelings take an orderly course. It was striving against the stream. I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
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Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Lex, lex-books.com/book/letters-written-during-a-short-residence-in-sweden-norway-and-denmark-31cde070-6515-49dc-a000-b903f635acf3.Wollstonecraft, M. (n.d.). Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/letters-written-during-a-short-residence-in-sweden-norway-and-denmark-31cde070-6515-49dc-a000-b903f635acf3Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/letters-written-during-a-short-residence-in-sweden-norway-and-denmark-31cde070-6515-49dc-a000-b903f635acf3.
